Hummingbirds I have known

Hummingbirds have always fascinated me. Seems that nature has always fascinated me though, huh?! No wonder I started a natural goat milk soap company. I became a student of hummingbirds 7 years ago after my daughter’s wedding. Her roommate from college had come all the way from Holland to be in her wedding. She and her husband stayed with us after the wedding and she gave me two hummingbird feeders as a gift. I was thrilled and put them up right away. We were all surprised that within 30 minutes we had a hummingbird at the feeder. More surprising was that these cute little birds were fierce warriors protecting their territory from each other.

I don’t know why they put more than one hole on a hummingbird feeder because they are only going to eat one at a time. I sometimes think they spend more time chasing each other than they do eating. On occasion I have rescued one that got stuck in our screening on our porch. They get so focused chasing another hummingbird that they fly into the screen and get their beak right through it! I carefully push it back out and they are off again.

We enjoy sitting on the porch and watching the males show off for the females. It goes something like this; the female will sit in the audience in one of the bushes by our porch. Then a male or two will take turns flying up and back in a huge arch; back and forth taking breaks to chase each other away. At some point someone decides the show is over and they all disappear.

Once I found an exhausted hummingbird in our garage. I carefully picked him up; he didn’t look like he was going to make it. I brought him into Dean and he decided he would feed him drops of sugar water from his finger out on our back porch. It was a good thing Dean did it outside because as soon as the hummingbird revived he was off. It was interesting that for about 3 days a hummingbird came to our back porch window. I think he was looking for a hand out. But it tickled Dean that he came back.